To what extent community health workers and outreach sites increase access to basic health services, East Shewa, Ethiopia

To what extent Community Health Workers and Outreach sites increase access to Basic Health Services, East Shewa, Ethiopia
Dawit Seyum, Tilahun Nigatu, Wakgari Deressa

Introduction: Universal access to basic health services has been the main motto of the global health actors for the last many decades. Accordingly, the deployment of community health workers and the use of outreach health service delivery points were considered as the key strategies of increasing access to basic health services particularly to rural communities.

Objectives: To determine the extent to which the use of community health workers and outreach sites increase access to basic health services.

Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in March 2008. The study was conducted on 330 households of four randomly selected districts of East shewa zone of Oromiya National Regional state, Ethiopia. A pre-tested, structured and interview administered questionnaire was used to collect data on time to reach different categories of health providers and health facilities. Data was entered in to SPSS 15.0 and analysed using statistical summaries, t-tests, ANOVA and their non-parametric analogues.

Result: In this study the median time to reach the nearest Formal Health worker was 30 minutes while the median time to reach the nearest Community Health worker is 20 minutes. The median time to reach the nearest Public Health Facility is 120 minutes while to the nearest Outreach site is 60 minutes. The median time taken to be fully attended at a health facility during the last visit was 180 minutes. The median times to reach the nearest private health services and traditional providers were found to be 120 and 15 minutes respectively.

Conclusions: The use of Community Health workers and Outreach Health service delivery points increase access to basic health services by 50% and 100% respectively.